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1. Who directed The Shining?
Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick shot nearly all of it on soundstages at Elstree outside London, building the hotel interiors from scratch, and the film did more than any other to make the Steadicam famous. Carpenter, Friedkin and De Palma had made Halloween, The Exorcist and Carrie.
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2. Who plays Jack Torrance?
Jack Nicholson
King objected that casting Nicholson so soon after One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest told the audience from the start that Jack was unhinged; he wanted a more ordinary actor like Jon Voight. Jack is a recovering alcoholic who once dislocated his son's shoulder.
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3. Who wrote the novel?
Stephen King
King has never liked the film, comparing it to a big, beautiful car with no engine, and he objected most to Wendy being reduced to a screaming victim. He got his own way in 1997 by writing and producing a three-part television version.
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4. What is the hotel called?
The Overlook
The exterior is Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon, while the interiors at Elstree borrowed from real hotels, including the Ahwahnee in Yosemite for the lobby. The Stanley, in Colorado, is where King got the idea, and the 1997 miniseries was shot there.
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5. Who plays Wendy Torrance?
Shelley Duvall
Duvall had a miserable shoot: Kubrick kept her anxious for months and ran the staircase scene, in which Wendy swings a baseball bat at Jack, well over a hundred times. Sissy Spacek had just been Carrie, and Dee Wallace later led another King adaptation, Cujo.
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6. What is Jack's winter job at the hotel?
Caretaker
Jack takes the off-season caretaker's job so he can write in peace, and at the interview the manager mentions that a previous caretaker, Grady, murdered his family there one winter. The hotel shuts from late October to May because the road becomes impassable.
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7. What is Jack and Wendy's son called?
Danny
Danny Lloyd was a small boy who was told he was making a drama rather than a horror film, and he did not see the whole picture until years later. He gave up acting soon afterward and went on to teach biology.
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8. What does Danny call the voice or imaginary friend he speaks with?
Tony
Danny describes Tony as the little boy who lives in his mouth, and speaks for him in a croak while wiggling his index finger. In the novel Tony is eventually revealed as a vision of Danny's own older self, Anthony being his middle name.
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9. Which hotel worker shares Danny's psychic ability?
Dick Hallorann
Hallorann is the head cook, and he explains the shining to Danny over ice cream as a gift his grandmother shared. He flies back from Florida when Danny calls to him telepathically, and the film kills him off moments after he arrives; the novel lets him live.
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10. What does Jack use to break down the bathroom door where Wendy is hiding?
A fire axe
In the novel Jack's weapon is a roque mallet; the film swapped it for an axe. Nicholson, once a volunteer fire marshal, chopped through the first prop door so fast that a sturdier one was built, and 'Here's Johnny' was his ad-lib from The Tonight Show.
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11. What room number is Danny warned about in the film?
237
The novel's room is 217, and the Timberline Lodge asked for a change so guests would not shun its real room 217; it had no 237. Hallorann warns Danny to stay out, and 1408 is the number from a later King story about another haunted hotel room.
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12. What word does Danny write that reads differently in a mirror?
REDRUM
Danny writes it in lipstick on the bedroom door while Wendy sleeps, croaking it in Tony's voice, and she reads it the right way around, as MURDER, in the mirror. The word is in King's novel too, where Danny sees it in his visions long before he understands it.
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13. What toy does Danny ride through the corridors?
A Big Wheel tricycle
Garrett Brown, inventor of the Steadicam, operated it himself, mounted low and following the trike at carpet height so that the sound shifts from rug to bare floor and back. The rig was only a few years old, having first drawn attention on the stairs in Rocky.
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14. What repeated sentence fills Jack's manuscript?
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
Kubrick had the pages typed for real, in stacks, with the sentence laid out in shifting patterns, and the foreign releases swapped in a proverb for each language, so Italian, German and Spanish prints show different pages. The line is an old English proverb.
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15. What garden feature becomes important during the final chase?
A hedge maze
The novel has topiary animals that come to life, which Kubrick dropped as unfilmable, so the maze replaced them. Jack loses Danny in it when the boy retraces his own footprints, and is left frozen there by morning while Wendy and Danny flee in the snowcat.
